


apotheosis / apostasy

by katadesmoi



Series: old songs [3]
Category: Hadestown - Mitchell
Genre: (look. i'm not entirely sure what i've written but i think eurydice might have become a god), Character Study, Deal With the Devil, F/F, F/M, but she gets to yell at hades some more so that's always a plus, slightly darker character interpretation for eurydice ig, the gang gets metaphysical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 22:53:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20590448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/katadesmoi/pseuds/katadesmoi
Summary: Eurydice knows it ain't wise to linger at the crossroads. But sometimes, the only safe harbour you've got is in the Devil's arms.Alternatively: not all gods are born divine.





	apotheosis / apostasy

**Author's Note:**

> i see your "don't equate christian conceptions of hell and the devil with the ancient greek underworld and hades" and i raise you "actually christian receptions of classical myths are genuinely interesting and can lend a retelling a lot of depth particularly in the wider context of american folklore and folk music" :)
> 
> my art [here](https://odyssaeus.tumblr.com/post/187466436342/sometimes-the-only-safe-harbour-youve-got-is-in) probably counts as a companion piece to this lmao  
ANYWAY alcohol tw, and tw for addressing some issues around ambiguous consent but nothing actually like, happens.

Music clings around Orpheus like a superstition. He’s always tapping out a rhythm on the bench, humming something under his breath, circling one finger round the edge of his glass and listening to that mournful whine with a thoughtful little frown. Today, he is whistling, high and clear, while they sit in the grass and watch the wisps of cloud crawl over the horizon.

A breeze picks up, barely more than a breath ghosting Eurydice’s bare shoulders. But she shivers all the same.

“What’s the matter?” Orpheus asks, running a hand through her hair.

“Bad luck to whistle out under the open sky,” Eurydice tells him pensively. She watches the grass stalks waver in the breeze. “The wind takes it as a challenge.”

Orpheus laughs, because he don’t know the wind like she does. He entwines his fingers in hers and she can see him look out across the cornflower sky, the green fields, a summer afternoon alive and buzzing with cicada song. He asks, “Do you really believe that?”

She mighta taken offence at those words, coming from any other man. But this is Orpheus. Her lovely guileless Orpheus, who ain’t had to fear the Devil for a single moment of his life. She smiles wanly. “Aye. You get a feeling for these things, out on the roads. It ain’t just superstition.”

When you got the Fates murmuring in your ear, you learn quick which gods to pray to and which to avoid like all Hell. The road has its own rules, and Eurydice sticks to ‘em like they’re law. She never whistles in open air. She always tosses a scrap of food off her plate for any spirits stranded east of the Styx, even when there’s barely enough for herself. She keeps a little salt in a tin, to toss over her left shoulder in case the Devil’s standing behind her while she’s at the crossroads. She collects stones, to leave as offerings to old Hermes on the cairns as she passes, so that he might watch over her while she travels.

In a world of gods, pragmatism looks an awful lot like superstition.

Orpheus smiles, like her insistence is charming more than anything else. But, she notices, he don’t whistle outdoors anymore after that.

The wind still finds her, in the end. Mourning summer sky blazes red, a warning to all them sailors and shepherds about the storm clouds a-rolling over the horizon. Eurydice can hear Fate at her shoulder, whispering at her to hit the road before it catches her.

And for once, she don’t listen.

And now –

Cold has split her lip open: she can taste brass on her tongue. Blood seeping red into the chapped pink corners of her mouth. Her knuckles purpling, backs of her hands stiff as a shed snakeskin. Every movement feels like her skin might tear like perforated paper. The storm has died down but the cold lingers, and the damage is done: she is well and truly lost. Pack gone; coat stolen by the wind.

Eurydice stumbles to a halt at the cairn that marks the crossroad, and drops her own rock among the rest of the stones with tremoring hands. Some customs bear observance even in the direst of times. Then she squints into the white sky, low and freezing, and watches the black clouds that loom on the horizon. Not long now. She needs shelter. Her breath rattles in her ribcage.

And there: the Devil, Old Mister Scratch, in black glasses and a black coat, pulls off his hat and goes to meet her.

"Hey there, songbird," he says, and his voice is like something being dragged across gravel deep in the depths of the earth. "Need a hand?"

Harsh winter light flashes off his watch, off the gleaming gold band that circles his finger. Wearing a fortune out on your sleeve like that don't get a body far up top. Folk would kill for less if it might mean something to eat. But this man got no cause to fear that, not when he's the one paying Death's wages.

"I'm fine," Eurydice mumbles. But she eyes up that watch. She eyes up the Devil's fine coat. She thinks: there are folks who'd die for less.

Mister Hades pulls off the dark glasses and fixes her with a smile. Too much hunger in it to be friendly. He says, "You sure? Be a shame to let the wind take such a pretty thing like you."

That deep voice got a power to it that sends something shivering in her bones. And despite the fact that it’s coming from the Devil, Eurydice ain’t quite sure it’s fear twisting her gut. She tamps it down, says, "Aye. I got somebody waiting on me."

"He might be waiting a while," Mister Hades says, too casually. Gaze flicks up at the darkening clouds. Down to Eurydice's bare shoulders, shivering against the cold. "If I were you, songbird, I wouldn't wanna be stuck out under this sky."

Eurydice ain't able to feel her lips well enough to speak. He's right. She ain't got the luxury of turning down an open hand right now. She rubs her hands together and winces as her split knuckles sting.

"I could always use another pair of hands down in Hadestown. It's hard work, but it's honest," he says at her silence. Steps a little closer. "Though I understand if you'd prefer to take your chances with that young man of yours up here."

He's offering her a way out. With that smooth manner and wicked smile, she got a feeling it ain't purely out of the kindness of his black heart. Oh, he don't say it, but she reckons he's wanting something in return. With the headache pressing behind her eyes and the taste of her own blood in her mouth, Eurydice might just be willing to give it. She ain't got any other choice.

And there is a part of her, that hungry part which watched the King of the Underworld step off that train and drag his lady back beneath the ground, that part that stirs something dark inside her that she ain't able to name, which thinks: there are worse things than this.

Eurydice’s done a lot of things she ain’t proud of. Breaking and entering, trespassing, stealing, even threatening when she’s had to. This is life, when you ain’t got more than you can carry. She tried being honourable, for the first years, and she’s got a bad scar on her hand from a smarter girl’s knife to remind her what that costs.

She’s always done what she has to, when the chips are down.

It frightens her how easy it is, to set her thoughts of Orpheus aside. How easy it is, to reach out and take those silver coins from Mister Hades’ open palm. Fingers trembling, metal hot against her skin. Eurydice’s a superstitious girl. It don’t do to tangle with gods. But sometimes, the only safe harbour you’ve got is in the Devil’s arms.

Here’s the thing: Eurydice’s always been hungry. Ain’t just for food, ain’t just for warmth. Hell, it ain’t even for a warm body next to hers or the comfort of a little companionship. It’s for something _more_. There’s always something beyond the horizon pulling at her: some notion that one there’ll be a place where she ain’t got the need to cower or scavenge. Some place where she’s got _freedom_, to be and to live and to dream.

Orpheus is free like that. For a while she’d though, maybe he could show her how to reach it. But good people like Orpheus only get freedom in a kind world.

And for Eurydice, the world is not kind.

Here’s how you get freedom in an unkind world: you gotta take it. You gotta seize it with both hands, snarling, standing on the backs of every other body who’s also tryna reach for the cursed thing. Break a couple of wrists, tear a little flesh. You get free by havin’ power, and Eurydice’s only ever seen people get that power at the expense of the people round you. Like Mister Hades’ fancy watch and his fine coat: it weren’t his hands shovelling the coal which paid for them, were it?

Eurydice’s got a hunger deep inside her, and it’s a frightening thing, sometimes. Like how a dog gets, starving on its chain, near-feral. It stirs when she sees others with things she wants to have. Reared its ugly head just weeks ago, when the Devil’s train pulled into the station to fetch his wife back down to Hell. The Devil stepped out of the carriage, and he’s got this way of draining the air all cold and still wherever he walks, this power emanating off him that sends something ravenous roaring up in Eurydice’s chest.

“Kinda makes you wonder how it feels,” she murmurs absently, half to Orpheus, half to the Fates circling at her back. And she don’t realise everybody else heard, not until the Devil is lowering those black lenses and staring her down like he’s trying to figure out if she’s worth his interest.

And that dark thing in Eurydice’s heart takes it like a challenge. She might be a penniless starving girl and he might be the King of the Dead and All Beneath, but she’ll be damned if she’ll cower under his gaze. That dark thing wants to snarl, _the only difference between you and me is that _you_ had the good fortune to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth_.

There is a split second where that is all there is. A girl staring down the Devil and daring him to come a little closer.

And then Orpheus steps between them, and Mister Hades pushes his sunglasses back up with a grin. Eurydice’s just a passing novelty, some girl too big for her boots, and he’s the King in the Mine. He takes his lady back aboard his train and he don’t look back. Eurydice watches the ghost train drift away and feels that hunger circling in her ribs like a tiger pacing a cage. You gotta admit: Mister Hades might be the Devil, but even Eurydice woulda taken that name if it meant a little _freedom_.

He says, “Step into my office.” And she knows what comes next. What happens to girls behind closed doors. But she thinks, I can’t run now. I made this choice. I took what the Devil offered and now he’s wanting his due. This is the price.

This is the price, she tells herself, as he shrugs off his jacket (pinstripes gleaming silver like veins running through the earth). This is the price, she tells herself, as she tries to read the papers in front of her but can only think about how her palms are sweating and the way the Devil is watching her like she’s a beetle pinned through the thorax to a corkboard. This is the price, she tells herself, as the Devil holds out the pen, and puts his hand on hers.

She stiffens. His skin is hot against her freezing fingers. Touch so gentle it might as well have branded her, like a scalding iron right where his fingers brush against hers. Her heart pounds. But Eurydice does not pull back.

The Devil says, in that voice low and deep as Kronos’ chains dragging in the pit of Tartaros, “Is this what you want?”

This is the price, Eurydice tells herself. What she _wants _got no business here. You don’t get to _want_, not when it’s your survival on the line. “Does it matter?”

And then the Devil’s hands pull back, so suddenly that Eurydice finally looks up at him. He kneels beside her chair, so that they’re eye-to-eye, and even though he don’t touch her again Eurydice can _feel _his presence, that great looming coldness like an ancient megalith, alien and terrible. The Devil says, with a kind of quiet gentleness that scrapes her skin for how _foreign _it sounds comin’ from his mouth, “Aye, songbird. It does.”

Eurydice has to tamp down on her surprise, that the Devil might have a conscience locked away in there somewhere. That the Devil is the sort of man who’d prefer to pretend he’s good, even if he ain’t. Those are pretty words and they’re utterly hollow, purely a gesture to soothe his own troubles. If he tells himself she coulda said no, then this ain’t the crime it really is.

There’s one problem, though: whatever he says, everything’s got a cost. It’s not a real choice. There is a still a price and Eurydice ain’t got any other option but to keep pushing ahead, because backing out now would only get her stranded upside the Styx begging for scraps like she always has. And deep down, there’s that dark hunger twisting on its chain inside her chest, and she’s scared to probe it any further for fear that it might reveal something about herself she didn’t want to know. The Devil’s staring at her with black eyes, so close that if she only leaned in…

She looks away. At the contract, on that fine paper, dotted line open and waiting for her name. She steels herself. This is her price, she thinks, and she says, “I’ll sign it.”

Old Scratch says nothing.

Eurydice feels something twisting in her chest that might be fear or rage or that hunger she’s too afraid to name. She fixes the Devil with a hard stare, a challenge, and she’s pretty sure that if she clenches the pen in her hand any tighter it’s gonna shatter under her fingers. But if she lets go she’s afraid that with nothing to keep her hands occupied she might just grab him by the neck and see if he needs air in his lungs as much as living men do. The silence stretches on and Eurydice wants to scream at him, _take your price and let me go_.

The Devil reaches up. Hand hovering just over her face. His fingers, hot as them furnaces roaring beneath the black earth, graze her brow, pushing those stray strands of dark hair from her eyes. Eurydice holds perfectly still, and she does not, even for a moment, avert her eyes from his.

Sometimes your only safe harbour is in the Devil’s arms, she tells herself.

And the Devil seems to be thinking, long and hard. His fingers are rough with calluses – what business does the boss have, that’s got his hands just as cut up as any working man? – and they trail gently to her temple. Eurydice’s heart is rattling in the cage of her ribs. Breaths short. Edge of the pen cutting into her palm where she’s clutching it, too-tight.

Then the Devil pulls back. Abruptly. Her skin where he’d touched her still burning. Leaves a great chasm of empty air between them, and he stands slow and heavy as a mountain before he turns his back on her. And Eurydice feels first relief and then dread, because she would rather pay the price quick than drag it out like this—

The Devil reaches for the decanter on the table and a lowball glass. Pours himself a bourbon and knocks it back too fast. Eurydice can’t make sense of it. She grips that pen tight and watches him pour himself another. What the hell.

He says, in a voice a little too raw for comfort, “You’ll start on the next shift.”

There has to be some catch. There has to be some _price_. This is Old Scratch she’s dealing with. He could take whatever he wanted, but he chooses not to collect?

She remembers the pen in her hand. The contract. She scrawls her name with shaking fingers and staggers to her feet. Watching the Devil’s back with her heart in her throat. He turns to face her, and his face is drawn shut with weariness. He says, not unkindly, “Go. You’re free.”

Maybe the Devil’s really just a sad old man whose wife don’t love him no more. Who can’t even get _infidelity _right, cause that woman’s got some hold on him that he just can’t shake. Not even for easy prey like a girl who’s got nowhere else to go.

If Eurydice feels a surge of pity for the Devil, she’s too busy fleeing that office to notice it. Maybe not everything has a price, she thinks.

But she realises the price later, when her own name slips from her. Oh, what had she expected? To take the sword by the blade and not get cut? To make a deal with the Devil and walk out whole? You sell your soul; you get your due.

Lucidity is painful, while she can’t even remember what her own face looks like. It is the opposite of a nightmare, because every moment is horribly real. The blisters on her fingers, the blood where her knuckles have split, every dry breath that scrapes in her throat in the smoke-filled hellish air. The work-song droning: _keep your head low oh you gotta keep your head low if you wanna keep your head oh your gotta keep your head low keep your head keep your head low oh—_

She begs the Fates, “Why can’t you take the rest of me too?”

Because perhaps forgetting wouldn’t be so bad, if she forgot what she’d forgotten. But she can feel the gaping absence of the memory, stripped raw like something torn out from her insides, and it hurts worse than any of her toil.

There’s someone who can soothe it: that Lady-beneath-the-Earth. singing a song like heaven’s light down here in hell. The Queen slips her a glass of something divine and a dead girl picks it up and it is _Eurydice _who puts it back down again. Eurydice, Eurydice, Eurydice. For the briefest moment she remembers what it is to be alive. She clings to Persephone with everything she has, because there is nothing else down here.

And maybe Persephone knows what it’s like, to put yourself in the Devil’s hands.

“Dance with me,” Persephone says, extending an open palm. Eurydice knocks back the rest of her drink (her fourth by now, after a shot of Mnemosyne and two foul chasers which set her throat ablaze) and takes it.

“I don’t know how to dance,” she confesses.

“I’ll lead. Just relax, and listen to the music,” Persephone says, with a crooked smile, and she pulls Eurydice right into the melee.

It takes her a moment to get a feel for it. Listen to the screech of the trumpets and that syncopating bassline: there, the rhythm hiding beneath the melody. Persephone whirls her around and then pulls her in close, a hand settling on her shoulder blade, and they’re close enough for Eurydice to smell her perfume: like peaches ripening on their branches. Something twists in Eurydice’s gut: a need to lean in closer, to feel the hand on her back drift lower—

And then Persephone sends her spinning again, and the music swells, and now all Eurydice can do is think about where to put her feet. One, two, three, four, one, two, three, four. Persephone pulls her into a twist and then another turn, swinging around her the way the moon clings to the earth. Persephone’s dress flashes beneath the electric lights, her hair tumbling over her shoulders, braided through with pale asphodel flowers. An exhilarated laugh flies from Eurydice’s lips. She is flying. There is nothing but the two of them and the music, cresting around them.

And when it finishes, she is breathless, and Persephone’s grin is like starlight. They stagger off the dance floor, and Eurydice realises she hasn’t let go of Persephone’s hand yet – or maybe it’s that Persephone hasn’t let go of her. Those four drinks in her system are hitting hard, like she’s floating above the crowd, so she barely notices they’ve wound up in another room until she’s shutting the door behind her. The music hums low through the thin walls. And Persephone is there, too close, peach-perfume, cheeks pink and skin aglow, and Eurydice feels something like an _ache _right down through her bones. The sharp twist of Persephone’s smile, the curve of her neck, her collar bones, lower still, to that green dress hugging her curves—

Eurydice sways, and Persephone’s hand steadies her at her elbow. Watching Eurydice watching her. Slowly, as if not to startle her, as if Eurydice was a delicate bird that might flit away at any moment, Persephone reaches up and brushes Eurydice’s hair from her eyes. Fingers graze her temple. Eurydice’s breath catches in her throat; Persephone’s fingers are warm as the Devil’s were, where they traced her brow in that very same spot. Touch just as maddeningly delicate.

“What do you want, Eurydice?” Persephone murmurs, and her fingers stay pressed at her temple, like that point of contact between them is the only thing that exists in the world.

This time, the twisting in Eurydice’s chest ain’t fear. But she can scarcely manage more than to whisper, “I don’t know.”

Persephone’s fingers trail downwards, to cup her cheek. Eurydice reaches up and places a hand over hers where it rests against her face. Heart pounding. And then, Persephone leans in and presses her lips to Eurydice’s jaw. Soft. Eurydice is caught in every direction, unable to string her thoughts together, and all she can do is stare when Persephone pulls back.

“Do you know now?” Persephone asks, and she’s wearing lipstick like roses blooming at the wayside. Eurydice wonders, between her scrambling thoughts, how it must look stained on her skin.

She blinks, tries to gather her strewn self up, while she watches the goddess with stars in her eyes. Eurydice, voice tremoring just a little, manages a little levity: “You wanna show me one more time?”

Persephone grins, mischievous and radiant. But it is in the way a flashfire is radiant, towering and fearsome above her, and Eurydice feels just for a moment like she’s dwarfed beneath something terrible and ancient and awe-ful, like the sun itself has been pressed into a fragile flesh frame. And she feels something in her gut that she can’t name, because it’s not quite fear, and closer to an all-consuming need to hold even the barest fragment of the divinity before her.

Then Persephone’s lips are on hers, and she is wholly flesh and blood. Here’s how broken wedding vows taste: like juniper veiling the sting of ethanol. Persephone’s lips, soft and cool as a summer breeze. Eurydice tangles her fingers through that mane of wild hair, inhales the scent of fresh fruit and honeysuckle, and thinks: Lord, there will be a price to be paid for this someday. But if Orpheus only knew this hell, perhaps he’d forgive her a little divine touch.

Persephone's wedding ring gleams in the low light. Cool metal against Eurydice's skin as her fingers cup her jaw. Between the inebriation and the astonishment and the longing pooling within her, Eurydice manages to say, "This ain't right."

Persephone pulls back, fixing her with that intense gaze. Godhead veiled in flesh is still godhead: feverish and brilliant behind those dark eyes. Eurydice feels a thrill go through her.

"Shall I stop?" Persephone asks quietly. And it’s a real choice: no debts owed here, no deals with any Devils.

"No," Eurydice says immediately, without thinking, because even as her heart aches, the flesh will have its way. She snakes a hand around the back of Persephone's neck and pulls her in. Presses her lips to hers in a desperate kiss. Persephone's hand trailing her neck, her collarbone, gently slipping the straps of her overalls off her shoulders. Every touch like the heat of the sun warming Eurydice's skin, every breath tasting of springtime and the world above.

And when they’re done, Eurydice will rest her head against Persephone’s bare shoulder and let her eyes flutter shut. When she wakes she’ll be that hollow shell of a girl again, and the Queen of the Underground will press her lips to her forehead and then send her on her way. And that hollow dead girl will go to work, and she will not think about her wedding vows or her broken promises, or even about the Devil sitting high up in his office above her. All she’ll think about will be her work: the blast of the furnace and the rattle of the engines and the constant shudder and whistle of Hell’s infernal machines.

The Devil sings them such a sweet song. He tells them they are safe; he tells them they are free. The dead girl knows it ain’t true but she can’t quite string the thoughts together to articulate _why_. So she listens to the Devil’s lullaby and she lets herself sink into this iron world’s cold embrace.

Persephone tells her, “It wasn’t always like this.”

Lowlight, rumpled bedsheets, Eurydice half-asleep and utterly undone, eyes fluttering as Persephone combs her fingers through her hair. She blinks hazily, still in the aftermath of the gentle euphoria that comes with this sacred thing they do.

“Does it matter?” Eurydice mumbles.

“Things changed once. They could change again,” Persephone murmurs. She presses her lips to Eurydice’s shoulder. “My husband was kind, once.”

They talk of their husbands even as they lie in each other’s arms. Eurydice stares up at the ceiling and says, “Aye, and Lucifer was once an angel. Sometimes people fall.”

And they don’t come back from it. This is the price Eurydice has paid: she is only herself when Persephone allows it. This is her future: to continue to steal what little life she can glean between summers, and spend the rest shovelling coal until her back breaks and she can’t see anything but smoke.

And Persephone sighs, and pulls Eurydice close. She says, so quietly that Eurydice ain’t sure she’s even meant to hear, “It don’t hurt to dream.”

Sometimes the foreman paces the factory floor, and everybody ducks their heads and busies their hands, mutters a prayer to whatever gods might hear that the Boss won’t look their way today. The dead girl oughta follow their example, but something don’t sit right in her chest. She frowns over her shovel at him, trying to reach for something inside herself that she feels should be there but can’t quite grasp.

“Get your head down,” someone hisses beside her.

But the dead girl ignores him. Stares at the Boss, with that shock of white hair, his clean-pressed jacket, watch gleaming on his wrist. Untouched by the soot and steel pluming up round the furnaces, like he’s still walking a world apart from all them unthinking hands stoking the flames. What right has he got, to dock their pay or send them into overtime, to snap at them to keep their heads low, when he’s walking round in that fancy suit?

She tosses a shovel-full of coal into the furnace. The boiler hisses. The flames flare up, casting them all in that scarlet glow. Across the way, the Boss’s eyes finally meet hers. Watches her for a moment, dispassionately, and then continues on without another glance.

The dead girl feels something building in her chest like those flames. She ain’t got a name for it. But just for a moment, like Tantalos straining for the fruit above his head, she feels some fragment of _self _echo through her bones. A name, for the barest moment, before it is snatched away once more.

The dead girl sees the boss man plenty. But Eurydice, well, she’s a creature confined to the walls of that speakeasy, where the Mnemosyne runs sweet and clear on the tap. And Mister Hades seldom likes to tangle in his wife’s business.

So when he _does _come round – shadowing the door like an ancient mountain’s uprooted itself and gone walkabout – everyone stops and takes a look. There’s a dip in the rowdy conversations for a split second, while people try to stare without it seeming like they’re staring, and despite the warm smoke clouding the air, it feels mighty cold. Frozen air like a meat locker. Carcasses shut in with the butcher.

Eurydice grips her drink tight. Head down, watching the crowd part discreetly round Old Scratch while he makes his way to the bar. Stands right beside her, and he don’t look down, so he ain’t to see Eurydice with her knuckles white on her glass. The barman don’t even ask for an order; just sets down a square glass of whiskey on the counter. The Devil takes it, and he says, “Where’s the lady?”

“Out,” the barman says. “Might be a minute or two.”

“I’ll wait,” the Devil says. And he takes a seat on the stool right beside Eurydice’s, and takes a sip of his drink. Too close. Eurydice is suddenly conscious of the flower tucked behind her ear, the pink stains of lipstick that must graze her jaw and her mouth. Like a red hand of guilt painted right across her face: if the Devil looks too closely—

She has to get out of here. She slips off the stool, eyes down, head low—then the Devil moves, too fast, and grabs her arm in his pale-iron grip.

“Where you headed so quick, girl?” he rumbles.

Eurydice’s breath catches in her throat. She tries to pull away, but he is immovable as the cavern walls that enclose Hell itself. His black eyes narrow at her, watching her with the cold curiosity he directs at his machines. A real strange look, like he’s tryna puzzle out if her hostility is just regular old resentment for the boss man or if it’s something a little more personal. Like he ain’t sure if that’s Mnemosyne she’d been sipping on just now.

“Sit down,” he tells her.

“Why?” she asks flatly. He just watches her, fingers still wrapped round her wrist. After a moment she complies – and he finally lets go. She settles back, rubbing her wrist where he’d touched her. She mutters, “I got places to be.”

“As far as I’m aware, I didn’t put you on the graveyard shift,” Old Scratch says.

“I’m surprised you even remember who I am,” Eurydice says. “Let alone which shifts I’m on.”

“I remember,” the Devil says heavily, and he takes another drink. “The real question is, do you?”

“I remember enough,” Eurydice snaps.

He glances sideways at her, eyes going to that flower in her hair. His voice is quiet. “I see you been spending time with my wife.”

Eurydice drops her gaze and swirls the liquid in her glass. Hoping to God he don’t spot the blush rising in her cheeks. She says, neutrally as she can, “There’s only one place you can get a drink round here.”

The Devil’s lips twist in a humourless smile. “She treating you alright?”

“Better than you,” Eurydice says, before she can really think through how the words will sound. She means the work; she means the way her fingers ache from clutching a shovel all damn day. But there’s another woman’s lipstick on her face, so that ain’t the meaning the Devil takes.

She can see it: the slightest twitch of his brow. A crack in the impenetrable wall of his face. He says, flatly, “How my wife spends her leisure ain’t any business but her own.”

He knows. But she can’t tell if he even cares. Maybe his marriage is such a wreck that it’s beyond any hope of saving. Hell, maybe Eurydice ain’t even the first time this is happened. But there’s a lonesome look creeping across Old Scratch’s face like an uninvited guest. Perhaps if he weren’t currently holding the deed to her soul, Eurydice mighta felt a little stab of guilt at that.

The dirt-cheap whiskey she’s been nursing has got her tongue running miles ahead of her self-preservation instincts, so she says, “So, you wanna tell me what the hell happened back up in your office?”

It’s been weeks. But this is the first time Eurydice’s come face-to-face with him since that moment. And besides, she’s really only _Eurydice _for a few hours at a time. Far as she’s concerned, it’s been a couple of days. Still fresh. Still utterly bewildering.

And if the Devil’s surprised by the change of subject, he don’t show it. He regards her coolly. “Does it matter?”

“Aye, it does,” Eurydice insists. She tips back the rest of her glass and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, scowling up at him. “I ain’t buyin’ that it was common decency back there. You coulda taken whatever you liked, and for some reason, you didn’t. Why?”

The Devil just sighs. His gaze falls to his ring finger, where that wedding band still circles tight. Ah. Persephone still wears hers too. Neither can let go of the other, even as they try, so desperately. They will always be tied together.

Eurydice surprises herself with the wretched sorrow that wells up at the sight of that ring. Pity, she realises, for Mister Hades and his wreck of a marriage. Eternal in the way of ruins, the bare skeleton of something beautiful, kept shambling ahead by nothing but the basest notion of what it once must have been. She slips off her stool, and pulls the flower from her hair. Carefully, she places it down on the bench beside the Devil’s hand. “Good night, boss.”

He don’t stop her, when she leaves. And she leaves Old Scratch to wait on his wife.

Sleep, which is so elusive in her spartan cot down at the hostel, always finds her easily after Persephone’s touch. The dead girl wakes in the arms of the goddess, and extracts herself gently from the blankets so as not to wake her. And this has become so habitual that even when she barely remembers who she is, the dead girl knows to reach for the glass of clear water on the table and take a drink. Just a sip of memory, before she heads back down to her shift.

Persephone’s office – some dingy backroom in the speakeasy, cluttered with more furniture than a body could ever rightly need – is quiet and still. The lamps flicker on the walls, in time with Persephone’s breaths, while she lies curled among the pillows on the settee.

Eurydice pulls on her shirt and her overalls, then shuffles around the desk to look for her boots, wherever she’d discarded them in a drunken haze hours ago. She finds them beside an old box at the foot of the chair, and is about to pull them on, when she notices the box’s contents: old silver-plate photos.

She pulls out the box and sets it atop the desk, and carefully examines the first print. A girl with wild hair and a stained dress, sitting beneath a tree. Her face and limbs are blurry, like she couldn’t stand still long enough for the photo to take. But Eurydice would recognise that smile anywhere. Persephone as a girl.

Eurydice hovers over the photo. She glances up, at the woman asleep across the room. This is prying, and it ain’t right. But Eurydice’s always preferred asking forgiveness to permission. She sets the photo down and picks up the next. The same young Persephone, hair pulled back in a scarf, with her arms round a young man who’s looking at her with a smile like she’s the only thing in the world. Mister Hades, Eurydice realises, from that broad face and thick-set frame, from the shock of untidy cropped hair that was white even in his youth. She barely recognises him, with such joy on his face.

Mighty strange it is, to think of gods being young once. Although the years have struck lines into their faces, it seems impossible that there was ever a time when they weren’t who they are. And to see them so plainly in love…the people in this photo know nothing of the hard times ahead. No nothing of Hadestown, of the seasons faltering, of _Eurydice_, caught between their marriage like a wrench stuck right through the works.

She turns to the next. The Devil as a young man again, staring at the camera with a seriousness that’s much more familiar. Got a set of overalls on, a headlamp hanging from its straps around his neck, a helmet in hand. Eurydice stares, at the blackened coal-dust that coats his pale face. A miner. Mister Hades was a _miner_.

She remembers how rough the Devil’s hands had been: calluses of a working man. The edges of that tattoo, which she sees straying from beneath his sleeve sometimes. She can feel herself on the edge of some epiphany, just out of reach. She stares at the photograph. Black eyes stare back up at her, unseeing.

“What the hell are you poking round there for?” Persephone says from the settee. Sitting up, rubbing one eye, while her hair falls across her bare shoulders in a tangle of auburn and pitch.

Eurydice waves the photos at her. Too late to hide her snooping now. “I found these.”

Persephone staggers to her feet, pulling the blanket with her and wrapping it around her chest. She plucks the photo from Eurydice’s finger and grunts disapprovingly. “Ah. These. That old bastard still hates havin’ his photo taken. Where’d you find them?”

“Just under the table,” Eurydice shrugs. She can’t hold back her curiosity a moment longer. “I didn’t know the boss used to work the mines himself.”

Persephone looks up at her with a scowl. “Oh aye, he used to. He’d turn the bath black with all the coal dust clinging to him at the end of the day.”

It’s not the answer Eurydice’s hoping for. Delicately, she presses further. “I thought that gods didn’t age. That you were always like this.”

Persephone laughs, sharp and bitter. She sets down the photo and leans on the table lopsidedly. Gruffly, she says, “I’ll tell you something about gods, sister: they’re made, not born. Divinity stalks you down whether you want it or not.”

Eurydice stares at the pile of photos. Gods who were young once. Gods who weren’t always _gods_. Impossible – but the truth is laid out in silver nitrate right before her eyes. Hades and Persephone were just a man and a woman once, and now they’re all twisted up in their godheads like an infirm tangled in sweating sheets during a fever dream.

Eurydice thinks of Orpheus. His song had the beginnings of something divine. Would he become a god too, in the end? Her hunger stirs in her chest. She thinks, if only I had a song of my own, perhaps I would not always be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

“It don’t do to dwell on the past, sister,” Persephone says, with a sour edge to her voice. She picks up the photos and sets them down in the box. “Let it be. We ain’t those people anymore.”

With no sun to mark the hours, days go by in fifteen-minute breaks, in the howl of the steam whistle, in those brief evenings at the speakeasy. The dead girl can feel herself sinking. Each new drop of Mnemosyne has to pull Eurydice from farther and farther inside herself. Like the contract will one day swallow her whole, and even the blessed river won’t be able to conjure her memories back for her.

She bums a cigarette from another worker and leans against the bricks, while she waits for her shift to resume. Never had the lungs for the habit up top, but here she’s inhaling fumes all day regardless. It can’t hurt her, not when she’s dead already.

The dead girl shuts her eyes and lets the minutes pass. Lets the smoke pass through her lips. In. And out.

And then: a boy comes staggering through the machinery.

Shock of red from the scarf round his neck. A guitar slung over his shoulder. The dead girl stares at the ghost, feeling something stirring inside her. Long forgotten.

Like an awakening, she says: “It’s you.”

A ghost from a dream she’d had once.

“It’s me,” the ghost says, scrambling towards her.

And his name springs forth, before she even recalls her own: “Orpheus!”

The ghost takes her by the arm, desperately, like she is his salvation. And her own name comes to her, just a split second before it leaves his mouth. He says, “_Eurydice_.”

Eurydice sobs, joy welling up fierce and bright, and she holds him tight. In one another’s arms, she feels, just for a moment, like she is finally home.

The Devil has a hundred hands, tearing Orpheus from her arms. His laugh is unholy, deep and terrible as the thundering of those dark horses that pull Nyx’s chariot forth from Chaos immemorial. Eurydice’s hands are empty. Blood rushing in her ears. She is shaking, she realises, but something roars in her chest. She barrels up the stairs and scrambles between the Devil and his office door.

“Stop!” she pleads. Clenched fists. “Don’t hurt him.”

“Step aside, girl,” the Devil says. Too calm. Like she’s a passing irritation. A fly to be batted away.

“No,” Eurydice says, voice cracking. “He’s done nothing. Your business is with _me_, and me alone.”

The Devil steps forward, and Eurydice feels like someone has salted her grave. Pin-prickling across her skin, the air thinning like everything, even the breath in her lungs, is being sucked in by the impossible gravity of the Devil’s presence. He is ancient. Black-eyed and cold, he says, “The law is clear. Go back to your work, child.”

Eurydice is shrinking beneath him. Or perhaps he is just looming, larger than everything, because the line between Hades the king and Hades the place is wavering in this moment. The Devil is everything. The Devil is the earth and sky and the walls that enclose them. He is the wire-snap and the spark, he is the bellow of the furnace, the howl of the whistle, the mine’s black maw and the great white radio towers that jut bone-like along Hadestown’s spine. He is everything, and Eurydice is _nothing_, no more than the barest scrap of soul still clinging to lucidity.

Orpheus screams below. Eurydice jolts; the Devil’s spell buckles, as that dark thing in Eurydice’s chest rears its stubborn head and bares its teeth. She bites her lip hard, and her mouth fills with the taste of brass. But she will not bend to the Devil. Not this time. She stares at that tattoo, circling his forearm.

“I know what you are,” she says quietly. But there’s something raging cold in her chest, and it fills her words with dark strength. “You got no right to stand over me like that, not when Lakhesis has cut us from the same goddamn cloth.”

The Devil stares down at her. Nostrils flare, first in shock, and then in anger slow and dark as burning tar. He says, “I am the King and Host of All Beneath. It matters not if I was once mortal. You’re just a girl.”

Eurydice is so tired of being _just a girl_. Of being pushed around by this cruel world. She has done everything she can, to press herself into whatever spaces the world will allow her. Played by every rule, followed the roads, kept her head low, made the bargain and paid the goddamn price. And where is she now? Still toiling in the earth, still at someone else’s mercy? For the rest of eternity?

She is tired. She is so _fucking _tired.

She finds that hunger coiling in her chest. Rattling the cage of her ribs, with a rage so bright she might open her mouth and set the world ablaze. She says, voice hard, “You came from dust, and from dust you’ll return.”

“I am Hades Polydegmon. I am endless.”

“You are flesh and bone,” Eurydice snarls. “Never forget that, Old Scratch. Because I won’t.”

The heat of the Devil’s glare ought to send her to her knees. But Eurydice’s past that. She has to find Orpheus. She turns on her heels, towards the stairs, where the Fates wait in the wings. Prowling like hyenas watching someone stagger into their own grave.

The Devil orders, “Stop her.”

The Fates step forward. Eurydice keeps walking. Atropos blocks her path. Ancient face twisted into a sneer. “Your fate is set,” she says. “You cannot change it.”

“I can try,” Eurydice says, staring her down. Let Fate hit her with everything it’s got: she’s gonna come back swinging. This is _her _story.

Atropos puts a hand on her shoulder, claws painful, digging into her flesh. But Eurydice’s hunger flares, wild and unbound, and she grips Atropos by the wrist and _twists_. Atropos screeches, and Klotho’s hand circles her other shoulder, but Eurydice slams through them with strength she didn’t know she had. She feels alive. She feels so beautifully, terribly alive.

Orpheus is down there. Her Orpheus. Her husband walked through Hell to find her. Now she’ll find him. Follow the sound of his voice along the Styx. She’ll take him back from the Devil.

Here’s how gods are made: hunger’s got a way with you, and it chews you up and spits you out as something you ain’t ever thought you could be. It turns pea-picking girls into queens, turns coal miners into kings. It turns poor boys into poets who can bring the seasons back into tune.

It turns songbirds into hawks.

Eurydice looks up at the great black Stygian sky, and she whistles, high and clear: a song that’s all her own.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are always always appreciated!! Thanks for reading, you can find me @odyssaeus on tumblr. 
> 
> If u want to see eurydice yell at hades some more check out my other fic [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19459969) :)


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